Among them, and perhaps primus inter pares, is Bill Bowerman - whose name still attaches to the traditional mile race at the annual Prefontaine Classic. 

He is the coach who stands at the heart of TrackTown USA, or Eugene, Oregon as non-athletics people know it.

The Classic was named after one of the many athletes Bowerman coached, although a nonpareil - Steve Prefontaine - who lived it large and ran it good before his tragically early death in a car crash at the age of 24.

Prefontaine was the local hero, the local champion. And although he just missed out on an Olympic medal after a characteristically brave and swashbuckling front-running effort at the Munich 1972 Games saw him finish fourth, it was his attitude, his character, his commitment to the challenge of running that made him immortal.

In 1975, the annual meeting at Hayward Field was due to be re-named the Bowerman Classic. 

It became instead, and has been since, the Prefontaine Classic, a name instated two days after the fateful accident on May 30 when the bold young runner crashed his convertible into a rock wall.

He had just dropped off Frank Shorter, the Olympic marathon champion, after they had attended a party at the home of fellow Olympian Kenny Moore. 

Prefontaine’s blood alcohol level was above the legal limit. 

Pre’s Rock, a memorial to him, stands at the site, much adorned.

While he was coaching Pre, Bowerman was also involved in founding Blue Ribbon Sports with one of his former athletes, Phil Knight. 

Soon that company would emerge under a name that is more widely known nowadays - Nike.

In recent years this has been the financial powerhouse up the road at Beaverton in north-west Oregon. The supporter, the innovator. The dictator.

The company is promoted globally by around 16,000 athletes and sports organisations.

Meanwhile there is a symbiotic relationship between Nike and the University of Oregon which has seen Knight, the Nike co-founder, arrange for more than $1billion of donations. 

And Knight spearheaded the Hayward Field reconstruction which cost an estimated $270 million.

There has been give and take - in 2005, Knight reportedly threatened to withdraw funding when the University’s athletics director, Bill Moos, refused to fire coach Martin Smith, who had failed to secure a National Collegiate Athletic Association team title in his seven years of tenure.

Smith was replaced by Vin Lannana, and Oregon restored its reputation as a collegiate athletics powerhouse, underlining the alternative naming of Eugene as TrackTown USA.

The company name was intrinsic to the operation which began in 2001 with controversial coach Alberto Salazar - three times a winner in New York and once in Boston as a marathon runner in the early Eighties who often pushed himself to the point of collapse - at its heart. 

The Nike Oregon Project (NOP) was created by Nike vice-president Thomas E Clarke after he reportedly became frustrated at the performance of American athletes in long-distance events since the days when Salazar bossed the Big Apple.

Salazar assembled some of the finest talents, mostly from within the United States, such as Mary Cain, Galen Rupp, Matt Centrowitz, Clayton Murphy, Donavan Brazier and Kara Goucher, while adding foreign talents such as Britain’s Mo Farah, Sifan Hassan of The Netherlands and Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha.

The massive financial support and plentiful attention to detail prompted many of these talents to outstanding achievement. 

At the London 2012 Olympics Salazar was pictured, beaming, between Farah and Rupp, respective gold and silver medallists in the 10,000m. 

Farah went on to complete the double, and retained both titles at the Rio 2016 Games.

In Rio, Centrowitz won 1500m gold. 

In that same year Hassan, already a double European champion, joined the NOP. 

At the Doha 2019 World Championships she won the 1500 and 10,000 titles. Last summer at the Tokyo Olympics she won the 5,000 and 10,000 titles.

But in 2017, followed a New York Times article alleging that Salazar, always one to push the envelope, had infringed United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) rules by experimenting over the intravenous introduction of L-carnitine. 

The substance, regarded as a beneficial supplement, could only be infused at restricted levels.

And while it was never found that any such experimentation had been conducted upon any of the elite athletes at NOP, in October 2019 USADA banned Salazar for four years, alleging he had "trafficked testosterone, infused a prohibited amount of L-carnitine and tried to tamper with doping controls."

Salazar denied and continues to deny the charges. 

In November 2019 Cain went on record saying she had been pressurised while at NOP to take diuretics without medical reason and was shamed about her weight to the point where she turned to self-harm and harboured suicidal thoughts.

By then, the NOP had been closed down. 

In January 2020, the United States Center for SafeSport put Salazar temporarily on the banned list while it investigated allegations against him involving sexual and emotional misconduct, making the ban permanent a year and a half later.

The NOP may be gone, but Nike strides on with its full complement of top performers.

Among those who regularly turn out in the Wanda Diamond League bearing the current Nike colours of blue and green are Olympic champions such as Jamaican sprinter Elaine Thompson-Herah, home shot putter Ryan Crouser, home 800m runner Athing Mu, and the respective men’s and women’s 1500m gold medallists in Tokyo, Jakob Ingebrigtsen of Norway and Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon.

All are expected to turn out in national colours at the Oregon22 World Athletics Championships. 

The talent converging upon the new-look Hayward Field for the first staging of this competition in the United States is dizzying.

But beyond the personal competition of this month there lies a bigger question: can TrackTown USA spread the word? Or in the words of the World Athletics chief executive Jon Ridgeon, can Oregon22 be "a catalyst to grow athletics in the United States?"

In May, Ridgeon, just back from a New York meeting with executives from the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), told insidethegames that it was "one of the core reasons" for awarding the World Championships to Oregon in 2015 that it should stimulate the growth of the sport throughout the country.

"The World Championships in Oregon this year are really important to us so we have spent a long time with NBC planning their coverage and how, hopefully, we can use Oregon22 as a catalyst to grow athletics in the United States," Ridgeon said.

"It seems that the United States produce the strongest teams in most years, but we all feel the sport should be bigger in the States than it is.

"NBC are a really important partner in this, and we are trying to use the Championships this year and the journey through to the Los Angeles 2028 Games to increase the profile of the sport in the States and also the fanbase.

"We are also working with agencies in America including USA Track and Field to generate ideas to connect athletes in the States with more people in the States.

"So this is a really important year for us - one of the core reasons the Championships were awarded to the United States was to try and use it as that catalyst for growth.

"Clearly with NBC it’s about going beyond their event coverage and making sure we use athletes in their other programming strands so we connect their huge audience with athletes outside the usual athletics 'bubble'.

"It’s about making sure that we introduce athletes and their great stories and the challenge of this summer to the widest possible audience."

Asked if that could mean items inserted into coverage of American Football or baseball, Ridgeon responded: "It could be that, or putting athletes on their non-sport chat shows, it’s all of those.

"Also we estimate there are 50 million people that run in America, but often they don’t associate themselves with athletics, with track and field.

"So we are going to work hard at trying to make sure that that’s a group we can connect with and attract to track and field this summer.

"It’s a big challenge that lots of people have discussed over the years without necessarily finding the answer.”

World Athletics President Sebastian Coe has reflected ruefully upon his experience upon flying from last summer’s Tokyo Olympics to Los Angeles and letting a host of newly established gold medallists go ahead of him to what he imagined would be a huge welcome and media fuss. Nothing. 

The newly-minted track and field champions wandered through the terminal undisturbed. 

Coe called it "bizarre" - but it was par for the course.

The conundrum of the United States is that, as Ridgeon points out, it is packed with recreational runners. 

It also has a ready audience, judging by figures quoted in a recent Wall Street Journal piece. 

According to a 2018-19 survey of more than 1,000 people aged 16-65 by Nielsen, athletics ranked eighth among sports in which Americans were most interested.

"The World Athletics-commissioned survey showed that 37% of respondents who were asked about attending events, viewing broadcasts or reading about a given sport, said they were interested or very interested in track and field," the Wall Street Journal piece said.

"The sport trailed, in order, football (66%), baseball, basketball, soccer, swimming, tennis and motor sports. It edged out golf (34%). 

"Ice hockey wasn’t included in the survey because it doesn’t typically overlap with outdoor track and field season, a World Athletics spokesperson said, although the Stanley Cup final is still going deep into June."

Coe commented: "To get to the top five, the metrics are pretty clear to us. 

"It’s about viewership. It’s about attendance in stadiums. It’s the engagement of fans. It’s also the commercial revenue."

Numerous major sporting events - the Wimbledon Championships being the latest - have evidenced unusual gaps in the stands even for what should be the most compelling of contests.

The recent USTAF Outdoor Championships - the world trials - which took place at Hayward Field last month did so in front of large tracts of empty seats. 

While the current economic climate will have had something to do with that, anecdotally there was much mention of the high costs of travel and accommodation.

TrackTown USA, sadly, is not TrackCity USA. Eugene has a population of around 170,000.

Coe added that spreading the word in the States involved a geographical imperative.

"If I’m being blunt, we’ve got to get into the L. A.s, the Chicagos the Miamis," he said.

Even so, when athletics gets into New York, which it does regularly, the crowds are small. Enthusiastic. But small.

While college-based events can draw big numbers, the recent New York City Grand Prix, a World Athletics Continental Tour Gold meeting, drew a crowd of less than 5,000 to the Icahn Stadium on the site where Jesse Owens once ran and jumped, and in the arena where Usain Bolt first broke the world 100 metres record in 2008.

According to the USATF chief executive Max Siegel, USA Track & Field will launch a five-city series of international competitions next summer, with venues yet to be determined.

The meetings may include mass runs, as recent World Athletics events such as the World Half Marathon Championships have done to spectacular effect.

Coe concluded: "If you said to me, what is it that I really want out of [the world championships in] Eugene? I would love to start building a portfolio of U.S. sponsors for the sport - domestically and globally."

Jon Lewis, founder of the Sports Media Watch blog, told Wall Street Journal that last year’s U.S. Olympic track and field trials drew TV audiences in the two-to-three million range, but that other domestic track meetings rarely reach one million viewers.

Nevertheless officials at NBC Sports Group, which owns the U.S. rights to World Athletics series events through to 2029, plan to capitalise on the pandemic-induced sequence of Olympics or World Championships in nearly every year from 2021 to 2027.

NBC Sports and World Athletics agreed to a long-term media rights extension in November 2020 that will keep World Athletics events on NBC through 2029, with the World Athletics Championships Oregon22 being the first of five outdoor World Championships that will be showcased on the network over the next seven years (2022, 2023, 2025, 2027, 2029).

NBC will also present the next four indoor World Championships, World Athletics Relays, and World Athletics Under 20 World Championships, as well as the next five World Athletics Cross Country Championships and World Athletics Half Marathon Championships.

The first outdoor World Athletics Championships to be held in the United States since the event’s inception in 1983 will see NBC sports presenting more than 65 hours of coverage this summer.

NBC will more than double its broadcast time for these World Championships in comparison to the last edition in Doha three years ago, moving up to twelve and a half hours, which will include seven hours of network prime-time coverage.

In total, NBC Sports will present 43 hours of television coverage plus extensive streaming coverage throughout the 10 days of the Championships including four nights of live primetime weekend coverage (July 16-17, July 23-24) and four days of live afternoon weekend coverage (July 16-17, July 23-24) on the NBC broadcast network.

Regarding ticket sales, World Athletics told insidethegames last week: "Tickets for the World Athletics Championships Oregon22 are selling well and we expect all ten evening sessions to be full. There are still good tickets available for the morning sessions.

"Overall, by the end of June about 70 percent of the inventory had been sold and local marketing initiatives are continuing."

Updating insidethegames on progress last week, Ridgeon emphasised that World Athletics is playing the long game.

"Oregon is just the beginning for us because we want to make the most of a window of opportunity for our sport in the US that has opened in recent years and extends at least to the 2028 LA Olympics," Ridgeon said.

"These two headline events are book-ending a seven-year period for us in which we feel we can make substantial ground in the US in terms of our sport’s visibility and the growth of our fanbase.

"We already have some really strong pillars in place to build on there. Track and field is the most participated sport in high schools in the USA, the US team is hugely successful and has magnificent and charismatic athletes in its ranks, we have a powerful broadcast partner there in NBC, and around 50 million people in the USA run regularly, so there is huge potential there to make gains.

"We’re already seeing that in terms of the number of world-class meetings that are being staged in the US now, compared with a few years ago. 

"There are now two US meetings in the World Indoor Tour, two Continental Tour Gold meetings and 18 Continental Tour meetings.

"The USATF and US-based meeting directors have worked with us to establish a bigger stage for their track and field athletes at home, which also creates more competition opportunities for our professional athletes around the world.

"It’s really important for fans to be able to see their favourite athletes, either live or via broadcast, in a friendly time zone. 

"So there’s been a real push on the competition side and we’re confident that will work.

"We have an agency working exclusively on building our sport’s profile in the USA and since the US team was named this week NBC has begun promoting the athletes actively, including into its lifestyle programmes. 

"Once the championships start they will be offering wide coverage across multiple platforms, as they have announced.

"We will continue to build on the opportunity of the world championships after the event finishes, with a range of marketing and promotional activities planned for the coming year in the USA."

As NBC now seeks the plums from the latest crop of talented athletes, for the delectation and delight of a wider audience, one of the prime picks will be Devon Allen, who at the end of this season is due to take up a three-year contract as a wide receiver with National Football League side Philadelphia Eagles - but who has been anxious to stress that he will be combining American Football with athletics.

Good luck with that, some may say. But Allen - whose prospects of home gold in the 110 metres hurdles look very feasible despite the presence of compatriot and defending champion Grant Holloway following last month’s clocking of 12.84sec, putting him third on the all-time list - is adamant.

On the eve of last month’s Wanda Diamond League meeting in Paris the 27-year-old from Phoenix, Arizona made a point of telling the media that he was not quitting athletics.

While the NFL is in no need of a publicity boost within the United States, that state of affairs can be golden for track and field. 

Allen’s story, and those of his high-achieving compatriots, could be transformational. 

World Athletics is certainly hoping it will turn out that way. 

If it is going to happen, it will happen now.